The Burden of Atlas
by maybemozartheals
Summary: The Prydwen has fallen from the sky, but somehow Arthur Maxson remains, taken hostage by an agent of the Railroad whom he once knew solely as Paladin Nora Bishop. Forced underground as a prisoner, the Elder wants for nothing but revenge; can he be taught forgiveness by the very woman who betrayed him, or will his fury be the Commonwealth's undoing? (Major canon divergence.)
1. Chapter 1

From above, a third and seemingly final explosion split the great airship in two, and Elder Maxson fell to his knees aboard the vertibird that had stolen him as the sky filled with fire. It had begun to rain, and he thought the fact fitting.

 _I'm sorry._

His stomach churned and he heaved, pieces of his hair dripping like wet oil into his eyes, but there was nothing left in him but smoke and whiskey and the blood that spilled over his face and past his tongue and he didn't know whether it was his or not. The howls of the zeppelin's sirens pleaded with him as if he was not centuries away, as if her passengers were not already burning inside her, their shrill warning warped into an eerie moaning by the speed at which her bow plummeted to the earth, and he was helpless. The vertibird quivered underneath him as its pilot shouted but he was numb to the words, and he licked the blisters on his lips and tasted the ashes that blew in on the wind; the flames had made quick work of his crew, and he folded over and gagged again around a breath that smelled to him like melting steel and bone, like cooking flesh, his hands grasping at what they could of the cold metal floor from within their bindings.

"Arthur."

The sound of her behind him threatened to undo him, and his hands shook in his attempt to ignore her. That she knew his first name, though it common knowledge, and could say it then as if it were not forbidden to her, as if it were not a _curse_ sent an unwarranted shiver down his spine, and he grimaced. The handcuffs cut mercilessly into his wrists and he fought against them, the heat stifling the screams that burned like bile in his throat, a surge of angry color boiling over the edges of his vision forcing him back on his feet. He cast his gaze downward; the sands of a beach had begun to approach them from below—fifty feet, forty feet, only thirty feet down, but he was not a patient man, especially now. He took a step forward.

 _"Elder Maxson."_

The irony of his title spoken aloud while her fire raged around them was overwhelming, and it would've taken very little for him to turn around and laugh in her face, but his legs moved him away without his permission like a machine's. Sweat stung at his wounds and glistened like tears in the horrible light on the horizon, mushroom-clouds fading, and he rubbed it away from his eyes with the heel of his palm so that he could watch his feet move beneath him. He thought he felt fingers brush against the back of his jacket, trying to grab at him, to stop him, but all that was left now of the _Prydwen_ was her skeleton, and he had reached the precipice.

He wasn't supposed to be there.

His body toppled gracelessly from the side of the aircraft, twisting and reaching for something solid, for something to save him as if it still possessed the will to live, and he wondered absently if the distance would be enough to kill him; they had always told him that he would live forever, but in reality he was very much a mortal man, and he realized the truth of this when his head hit the ground with a harrowing and very mortal _crunch_ and pain bloomed behind his skull like the glow off of his sunken ship.

It was the face of Paladin Bishop that he saw as his vision turned to black.

* * *

She wasn't supposed to be there.

The grey storm that shook the metal hull of the _Prydwen_ from outside was enough to turn her knees to jelly without the dread that had begun to beat into her chest as if it were a war-drum, and in her anxiety she had taken the walk that led up to his door a few times more for good measure before her knuckles rapped on the steel, short and polite, as if pleasantries were any good anymore. She stole a glance over her shoulder, half-expecting to find a mob of tin soldiers and their rifles at her back, but she had been careful, she knew; the patrol on the catwalks had saluted her after she had placed the explosives—"Paladin," the one had said, his chin proud and fist steady, and though she couldn't look him directly in the eye as she returned the gesture, Nora had felt, for the first time since the world had been torn out from under her and replaced by a ruined and dying imposter, _confident._

That moment had promptly fled after she had started down the ladder to the command deck only to be faced with the door of Arthur's quarters, and she remembered.

 _Not like this._

"Elder Maxson?" She said after the silence in the room lasted more than what her frayed nerves could tolerate, and she swallowed around her heart in her throat. "Paladin Bishop, sir. May I come in?"

She could've run, then, forsaken him and his soldiers and the tenets that had slowly but surely become her own as if they had never existed, had never mattered, and returned to the 'bird that Tinker had waiting for her outside; she should've, because she wasn't _this_ anymore, because she had more faith in the bombs that blinked red two stories above her head than in the Brotherhood's empty rhetoric, in Arthur Maxson's self-proclaimed godhood, because she _wasn't supposed to care this much_ , but then she heard him grunt in answer from someplace behind the wall at her nose, granting her entry, sealing his fate, and she was lost to the screaming in her veins.

The metal groaned under the hesitant weight of her palm as she pushed it open.

He was bent over the table that she had grown to notice was habitually crowded by discarded liquor bottles, all in varying degrees of emptiness, and she saw that now was no different—he had a hand curled protectively over one vial filled with ominously dark liquid, and he nursed a sip from it before his eyes shot up to where she stood with startling lucidity. His heavy brows cast shadows over his face, twisting him until any residual semblance of youth was eaten by the clever lies written plain on his skin that half-won battles had made him wise, and he regarded her boldly and with a harshness equal to the forces that had scarred him.

"Paladin," he said, more as a statement than a greeting, and without standing he gestured with a lazy hand to the chair that sat opposite to him. "Sit."

"No," she said, her feet stubbornly sticking to the floor outside of his door left ajar, and she wondered at how she had lasted so long already. She thought quickly. "There's been an accident. On the flight deck. They're asking for you personally, sir."

He looked confused, and she thought that only fair. He cocked his head as he started to rise, brow knitted, his joints popping and his jacket falling in gentle ripples around his thighs as he unfurled from his seat to utterly tower over her, and if she were a lesser woman, a blinder woman, she might've been more intimidated by the display.

"What _kind_ of accident?"

She stumbled, stiffening under his inspection, her feet shifting eagerly in their need to get away, to turn around and start walking and not look back until the fire had taken it all, with or without him, but her resolve (compassion? Pity?) was stronger. "A vertibird. It came in too hot."

"And I'm being asked to do what, exactly? Supervise?"

She sighed internally, patience buckling, stuttering something unintelligible in exasperation before taking a step towards him and extending an arm out and into the hallway, motioning for him to _please,_ just _go,_ holding his gaze with mirrored ferocity.

"They were insistent, sir."

He looked as though he might've argued against that logic, or lack thereof, before he straightened, squared his shoulders, and nodded curtly down at her. He cared about his soldiers, that she knew, and she suppressed the bittersweet wave of satisfaction that sung in her bones at having succeeded in her task, no matter how foolish, how _selfish,_ as he moved to follow her.

"Take me."

She had hit him hard from behind with the butt of her rifle as they emerged onto the exterior deck, the two patrolmen slumped against the wall of their stations having met a similar fate on her way in. He remained coherent enough to struggle, albeit weakly, against her grip as she whistled for Deacon to help her, and between Maxson's weight and Deacon's protests, it took them a while to reach the vertibird, crimson beginning to stain the blue and supple leather of her armor at the crook of her neck from beneath the wound she had given him. She was thankful that she had brought the handcuffs as a precaution as Arthur woke to the sound of the first explosive going off behind them, fireworks against the congregation of thunderclouds, but she was unprepared for the strength of his reaction, and her bloodied hands stung with uncertainty as he crumpled to his knees.

 _"I'm sorry."_

* * *

"Jesus, is he dead?"

Spots of muted color danced in front of his eyes as he tested them, his body rolling listlessly as the very ground awoke beneath him and recoiled at his touch—sand, he remembered, and he clung to a fistful of it as if it would drop away and leave him falling again into oblivion. He shifted the distant hum of his consciousness in order to assess the damage done, finding with thorough disappointment that he was, in fact, alive; his left arm had been pinned at an inhuman angle beneath his weight, and, amongst all the lesser aches, something had certainly been punctured in his chest, but he could still move himself. He did so, then, hovering just inches over the fickle slope of the beach so that he might pull the twisted remainder of his ruined limb, still handcuffed to the other, out from underneath him, and the sensation was overwhelming. He groaned, a glorified whimper, the sound a pitiful echo between the raw flesh at his ears, and in response he felt the sand near his head make way for a pair of obscenely feminine hands as someone kneeled to look on his agony for themselves.

"I don't think so," the hands said, and though his neck resisted his plea to turn and see the face that they belonged to, their voice was sweet, and haughty, and he knew it all too well.

 _Traitor._

"Bad plan, Whisper. Bad fucking pla-"

Arthur barreled forwards, his good arm pushing him from the ground in a raw whiplash of power to catch his shoulder in the delicate juncture of Bishop's throat and clavicle, indifferent to the cacophony of protestation from his barely-functioning body. They fumbled, blood spattering from the multitude of sources on his skin before he regained the momentum to hurl her downwards, muscles screaming, and he _growled._ He heard her choke on a breath beneath him as they dropped, her soft hands on his back, on his head, scratching at his hair and returning red with the end-product of his fall, but his knee pinned her at the stomach when she met the ground, the broken tatters of his left forearm across her chest, and she was trapped.

He imagined punching through her as his interlocked fists came down on her cheekbone, just under her eye, and she gasped fast in surprise and began to yell before a second lick tore through her bottom lip and silenced her. Something hitched in his chest as a wet gash crawled up the pale planes of her face, bright eyes lolling, but the white-hot madness flooding his veins took no mind, and his arms coiled at the command to finish her, to correct her, to _stop the fucking pain._

Two male voices shouted at him, one distinctly closer than the other, and before he could land another blow someone had hit him from behind with something short and hard, and he had fallen to the beach again.

The vertibird's pilot and a slight man in sunglasses tended to Nora as Maxson collapsed onto his back at her side, easing his spine and the bruises that already pooled there to the sand, adrenaline receding like the tide that pulled gently at his feet. Blinding rage made way for anguish, the sudden shift disorienting, and as he stilled there was nothing left to concentrate on but the way his bones grated under his ruptured flesh, the incessant pounding at his temples, the barrel of the 10mm that had remained trained on his chest, but when he willed unconsciousness to take him the call went unanswered.

"It's okay, Tinker," Bishop grunted, and he watched through slitted eyes as she rose and motioned for the pilot to lower his pistol, rubbing at the back of her head as the other man hovered closely at her elbow. He saw that her nose had also been split in his assault, tender cartilage leaking and turning purple in the firelight that bounced off of the waters, and he was woefully uncertain of how to feel about it.

She looked down at him then without such doubt.

"He won't be getting much more action where he's going."


	2. Chapter 2

They had built him a room that would serve as his prison. It was crude, and the bars of iron that Tinker had salvaged from the surface were brittle and orange with rust, but the Railroad was not accustomed to harboring criminals of war, and it was all they had. There was a door, at least, and Desdemona had outfitted the space with a wicker mat and a bucket in the corner, but Nora found that once he was in it, slumped against the back wall that could hardly contain the breadth of him like something broken and unrecognizable, like something so excruciatingly _human_ , blood congealing and fingers twitching in his sleep—that once it was _his,_ she had stopped thinking that it was justice.

They had put Arthur Maxson in a cage to die in, and she would be there to watch, like she had watched his soldiers go up in smoke.

She couldn't help but feel like the sentence was a double-edged sword.

The wounds on her face sang, the fresh bruises hot under the careful probing of her fingertips, and she huffed a breath in annoyance at the memory the touch elicited. She had given him a stimpak for his arm after he had attacked her on the beach, and she would have been remiss if she hadn't taken some modicum of revenge by stabbing the needle a little too close to home.

The shock had forced him into unconsciousness somewhere along the 'bird's run to the Old North Church, and though he had fallen powerless in all definitions at her feet as she sat, curled in on himself as if he had forgotten that he could've swallowed them all whole, his dreams painting his face a gentler shade of loathing, she wanted nothing more than in the moments before they landed for him to just disappear, to have never existed, for this physical embodiment and reminder of her crimes to have burned away along with the rest of them rather than leaden her every breath with the plague of his contempt, but he didn't, he hadn't, and she knew she couldn't leave him.

She had done this to herself—to _him,_ and she desperately needed to assuage her guilt, even if it was with lies.

She walked the path to his makeshift cage, now, nestled in a forsaken corner of the crypt that had once been used as a sort of firing range. The oily darkness of the room and a collapsed wall of brick and mortar lent him ample privacy—a courtesy, if unintentional, and she was grateful for it as the bouncing light of her lantern illuminated for her his shame as she approached. The body of her Elder had gone, and in its place sat a husk, defeated and mangled, it's immortality stripped and it's eyes which were once his eyes sunken in pits of purple-blackness and eaten by acquiescence, and she had killed him, she knew; if not literally then in every other sense.

His jacket had been torn and sagged halfway off of his shoulders in some poetic act of symbolism, and she realized grimly that she hadn't known him, not truly, not when he could become something so utterly opposite so suddenly, and she wondered how much of the man she thought she had saved was still there, pounding at his insides, screaming for her to _let. Him. Go_ , and the metal hinges whined in welcome as she joined him in his prison.

The air was much colder inside.

He flinched awake at the sound of her feet so close, starting to stand but failing as if something strong and fierce pulled down on him from below like tangible hands. A noise that began deep in his chest spilled unbidden from his broken lips, and the sound seemed to remind him, to startle him back to cruel reality like a bath of ice-water, and he noticed her.

They watched from either side of the stifling space as neither moved, masks impassive, the tension a living, violent thing, until Nora bared her teeth and _smirked,_ relenting the higher ground to place a small plastic tray on the stone between them and push it towards him with the tip of her boot. Her fingers found her hip and pressed, the length of the concealed knife stark and reassuring where it played against the skin there, waiting as he tested the chains that held him at the ankles to look over the serving of Salisbury Steak with something akin to disgust, or maybe suspicion.

"If I wanted to poison you I wouldn't ruin a perfectly good steak to do it."

He recoiled slightly as if the words had stung, ignoring the plate of food altogether to look her up and down as if he had never been so close to a human being before, as if he was thirsty for the sight, and to her dismay a hot prickling began to shoot across her flesh like newborn stars beneath his study. She held herself still, her fist clenching against her shirt and the outline of her blade as he swept the room with his gaze, quick and precise, searching the design for error before his blue eyes burst with bitter heat and returned to her empty-handed. He sunk into the bars at his back as if they had always meant to be there.

"Where am I?" he asked.

"A cell," she answered.

Kindling for the fire.

She couldn't ascertain how much time had passed before she felt him calm again, resuming his silent fuming as she remembered herself and dug into her back pocket, stepping gingerly around the sprawling tangle of his legs until the crown of his head was level with her navel—above him, for once. She inhaled, balance shifting precariously on the balls of her feet, eyeing him and his coiled rage before coming to the conclusion that he probably wasn't stupid enough to attempt to kill her in what was obviously _enemy territory,_ and kneeled, splaying an eclectic array of medical supplies on the ground by his side. She arranged them in an order known only to her, picking them over with gentle hands and a diligence that was hardly necessary before looking up to him, expecting surrender, expecting to command, but he had been watching. She swallowed, her attention flickering over the roughspun expanse of his face suddenly so close, so different, somehow, and she made her voice be kinder.

"Are you going to be difficult?"

He seemed to seriously consider the prospect.

"No," he said, and she marveled at how readily she believed him.

She nodded, grabbing a cloth doused in antiseptic from the floor and willing herself to bring it to the gash at the back of his skull, his hair swept into an unruly mess and tinged red at the edges as if the fire itself had clung to him. He winced, hissing through his teeth, and she forbid the wave of accompanying emotion passage through her veins before it could betray her. When the cloth returned thick with gore, strings of grey and dying flesh sticking to it like tar, she realized that she was sorely unequipped to continue, and she stayed her hand; Carrington had refused to see to Maxson himself, and despite her severely lacking practice in all things medicine, she had been the only one left to volunteer for the task. She fumbled with a needle and a line of thread that looked suspiciously like dental floss at her knees, dreading the possibility of having to _put_ it in his _head._

"You should be dead," he said abruptly, and when she looked his face was stone and the harsh line of his lips cut into him like glass.

She shrugged, unfazed, returning to search her row of sterile and daunting things as if she knew what she looked for.

"So should you."

He looked away, and she thought that that was the end of it. She tested a roll of bandages in her palm before remembering that she had wrapped Nate's arm, once, tender and grease-stained after he had sliced it open on something misplaced as he bent over the engine of their car, and the memory was ancient and faraway and jarred her insides until they screamed. She bit the inside of her cheek and moved to get a better reach at Maxson's wound before his eyes had returned with a vengeance, stealing back her boldness, peppering her with their turmoil like angry raindrops on her skin.

"Am I supposed to be grateful?" he spit, his mouth twisted in mocking, but his focus was too far gone to master himself.

He was in pain.

A breath whistled tersely on her tongue, and she met his stare for a long while, embracing his hatred like it was her own and pushing it deep into her belly so that she wouldn't forget herself. It was a kind of torture to have him look at her like that, but at least he still looked at her, she reminded herself, instead of throttling her where she stood, instead of _touching_ her again, and she leveled her shins flush to the stone as if it would lend her its strength. A slender finger rose unconsciously to swipe across the swells of sickly color that spread over her nose like nebulae, and she clutched the bandages to her thigh like a lifeline.

"I didn't want them to die, Arthur," she tried, "but I didn't have a choice—"

" _No_ ," he all but whispered, choking on a weight in his throat. His brows furrowed, a nearly-imperceptible shudder racking him. "No, you don't get to _do_ that."

The words shattered something in her at the same time that something else awakened, seething at her edges like the burning alcohol pressed into her hand, and she didn't know what to do with it. She felt sorrow, if only that which reverberated off of him in gales of toxic power, and though she had accepted that what she did was wrong, was _genocide_ , that she could feel so strongly and so suddenly in the aftermath of her choice—for it was, truly, her choice—at the voice of his suffering terrified her.

She shook her head. "You wouldn't have stopped on your own."

"Fuck you."

He had removed himself from her so completely, then, burying his face in the columns of shadow at his side like the half-child that he was, and she felt the absence of his attention like frostbite in her lungs. Her lips fluttered soundlessly with the empty promise of words before they went slack, pulled into a frown by the heat that began to roil at the base of her spine and pound at the place between her lungs, all at once furious, and she leapt to her feet, dropping the ball of gauze to the line of others that lay unused to gesture around them with her arms outstretched and her heartbeat in her ears.

"Look around you," she said as if he was blind to what she saw, her voice dripping with false derision. Her face was hot, and the walls closed in around her. "This is the consequence for _your_ actions. You aren't getting out of this.

"Your army can't save you anymore."

He sneered into the darkness, but she saw him hesitate, his knuckles turn white, and she knew she had struck him.

She had thought that this would be easy, that she would be in control, that she could begin to _convince_ him, but with every moment she spent with him the more and more she seemed to be at the mercy of her emotions, and they were merciless. He was weak—she could see the proof of it in the carnage that stained his body, and yet it was as if he and his fury had managed to hook into her and crawl under her skin with a force that she could not match.

She needed to leave.

She tried to reach for his eyes as she was pulled half of her own accord to the exit, but he had squeezed them closed, shutting her out, and an unnamable ache ate at her chest though the anger.

She took a step away. "I'm all you have."

"Then I have nothing," he assured her, infinitely sad, and she believed him when he said that, too.

* * *

He was a liar.

She returned only once a half-day later to drop an identical tray of steak next to the first, and he had found himself restless and wanting after she fled again without so much as a word. He might have predicted her, once, when protocol kept her tame and civil, but mass murder had seemed to turn her wild, and her irreverence towards him cut him to his core. He would rather her mock him, torture him, claw apart his soul and leave him raw and bleeding than be left with this silence, with only these sticks and strings to grasp at as if _he_ had betrayed _her_ , because at least then he would _know,_ but she had stayed away, and his flesh perpetually itched with unease.

 _I'm sorry._

He slept most hours, breathing life to ghosts in his dreams, and he had attempted to sew the gash at his head with the supplies she had forgotten, to wrap it, at least—to keep himself alive, but his hands shook and the thread was slippery and the echo of her voice was playing at his ear, across his ribs, stabbing into his bruises, and he really couldn't see the point. She had burned herself into his eyes, and no matter how hard he scratched he couldn't stop her from laughing at him, from cursing him, and he was so tired.

He hated her, then—because she had ruined him. Because she had left him. Because he was _lonely,_ and the words she had undoubtably spoken to spite him returned to spill molten fire on his tongue, scraping at his teeth, poison in his mouth, and he could _kill_ her.

Because _she was all he had._


End file.
